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Sunday, December 23, 2018

The annual selection of books published in either hardback or paperback for the first time this year.

(Here is our annual round-up of Books of the Year lists).Book of the YearDavid Park: Travelling in a Strange Land. Short, absorbing, deeply moving. Park flies under the radar in terms of Irish fiction. This is outstanding.

Fiction:Melatu Uche Okorie:This Hostel Life. Three short stories that have a big impact. A new angle on Irish life. Let's hope she's writing a novel.

Sara Baume:A Line Made by Walking. A dreamy, dreaming voice in the countryside.

William Trevor:Last Stories. Published posthumously: what a standard for a man in his 80s.

Kamila Shamsie:Home Fire. It handles a lot, and handles it brilliantly.

Tim Winton:The Shepherd's Hut. Author of last year's Book of the Year, The Boy Behind the Curtain. Does anyone match him for a sense of place?

Emilie Pine: Notes to Self. The best book of essays this year. How to write about yourself with brutal and moving honesty.Fintan O'Toole: Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain. The definitive analysis of the horror show we're living through.

Mary Beard: Women and Power. What a strong voice.Richard Ford: Between Them. On his parents. You never stop being a child at any time of your life.Michelle McNamara: I'll be Gone in the Dark. True-crime chiller, with a dramatic post-publication development.

Saturday, December 22, 2018

Here
we go again: our 9th annual popular post of books of the year as they
feature in the press (excluding papers and articles with pay-walls, such
as the London Times and Sunday Times and most of the Financial Times)
and on some blogs. This is a selective list of what we judge the
highest-quality lists: if you want almost everything that moves, check
out Largehearted Boy.The list will be updated pretty well daily up to Christmas.Previous lists are here: 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017.

The annual Irish Times choices by
writers demonstrate how strong a year it has been. Emilie Pine's
powerful collection of essays, Notes to Self, features, with Pine
herself going for Natalia Ginzburg's The Little Virtues. Paschal
Donogue, Minister for Finance, is a rare real reader among modern
politicians, and chooses Ian Kershaw's Roller-Coaster, the latest in
Kershaw's overview of European history. Joseph O'Connor points out one
of our own choices, the brief collection of stories This Hostel Life by Melatu Uche Okorie, a new voice looking at Ireland from an entirely new angle. Elsewhere, Anna Carey has the standout children's titles of the year, including the excellent Louise O'Neill's The Surface Breaks, a re-imagining of The Little Mermaid. Elsewhere, Malachy Clarkin looks at the best sports books of the year: Peter Crouch turns out to produce the greatest laughs.

The Irish Independent has 50 top children's books from Sarah Webb, with good Irish representation. Its critics also name their best books of the year, top pick in fiction being Emer Martin's The Cruelty Men, which is 'stunningly ambitious and achingly tragic.' Michael Connelly, always reliable, appears twice in the thriller section. Another critics' selection mentions Tim Dee's Landfill, 'nature writing for the Trump era' from the excellent Toller Press, and in fiction John Boyne's amusing novel about literary ambition, A Ladder to the Sky.

The Guardian's selections are always interesting. This year, Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland's First Minister, highly recommends Anna Burns's Booker-winner, Milkman, In another selection, Justine Jordan kicks off with the always readable Jonathan Coe's Brexit novel, Middle England. The Best Children's Books for All Ages points out that one in every three paper books sold this year in the UK has been for children, and Fiona Noble writes that 'In troubled times, books have the power to help children and young people make sense of the world, and a look at 2018’s award winners reveals just how writers and illustrators are responding to our challenging times'.

The Guardian's Sunday sister, The Observer, also has a good list: their critics choose selections from genres such as Graphic, Poetry, Fiction and Society. In Art, Laura Cumming, author of the excellent The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velasquez, mentions two books on Bruegel, including Winter Scenes, which looks wonderful.

The Times Literary Supplement is of course a key place to go. Their annual list
has a lot of high-quality recommendations. The great Lydia Davis goes
for two books by Natalia Ginzburg, while Roy Foster recommends Colm
Tóibín's new book Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, about the fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce.

The New York Times100 Notable Books is always a formidable list (some great covers this year, too). Rachel Cusk is a 'Marmite' writer; her Kudos appears here, and the very different Macbeth (the thriller-writer Jo Nesbo's version).

We've previously recommended the superb site Five Books: a simple idea, executed with depth and it has a series of Best Books of 2018, including for instance Best Non-Fiction by Fiammetta Rocco (with Ben McIntyre's highly-praised book about Oleg Gordievsky, The Spy and the Traitor), Nigel Warburton's Best Philosophy Books, and Charles Foster on Best Nature Books.

From Australia, in the Sydney Morning Heraldlocal writers make their choices, including the great Tim Winton (author of one of our own Books of the Year: more shortly) going for a 'deadset masterpiece', The Overstory by Richard Powers (this is echoed elsewhere by Robert Macfarlane).

The Spectator's lists (both of best and overrated books) are always good: the first starts with Deborah Eisenberg's 'oustanding' short story collection Your Duck is My Duck, and the second includes one of our own books of the year, William Trevor's Last Stories (an extraordinarily high standard right to the end).

The Spectator in the USA has lots of interesting choices, many from the past. Keiron Pim, who is writing Joseph Roth's biography, is of course reading Roth a lot, including The Radetsky March.

The New Yorker's Best Books of 2018 by Kate Waldman includes that Marmite-writer Rachel Cusk's novel Kudos. Dan Chiasson looks at poetry books during 2018.

The New York Times Book Review has the 10 Best Books of 2018, which include Tara Westover's very successful memoirEducated, which reveals 'an irrepressible thirst to learn'.

National Public Radio from America has over 300 books from
their staff, which you can filter by the usual categories, as well as
'Rather Long' (including Michelle Obama's well-received Becoming), and 'Rather Short' (Kate Walbert's His Favorites looks powerful).

iNews has 10 Best Books, including the ubiquitous Normal People by Sally Rooney and Tara Westover's much-noticed Educated.

BBC Arts have 2018's 'biggest books' (not in physical size) with 'the perfect for...' sections, including Sarah-Jayne Blakemore's excellent Inventing Ourselves: the Secret Life of the Teenage Brain (the perfect book for parents, presumably).

Vulture's Best Books of 2018 by Christian Lorentzen is a good choice. Keith Gessen's A Terrible Country sounds interesting, and very much of the moment ('like a zombie parody of the Cold War).

Bustle is a newcomer to this round-up. Here, 14 Young Adult authors recommend their favourite YA books of 2018.

Another newcomer: the Church Times has readers' choices of books of the year. Anything Neil McGregor chooses is bound to be interesting: he goes for The Seabird's Cry by Adam Nicolson, 'as exhilarating and poignant a read as watching the birds in flight.'

iNews has its best books of the year, including Sally Rooney, William Trevor, and Tara Westover. A different name is Zadie Smith, with her new collection of essays, Feel Free.

Prospect Magazine rounds up the best books in politics. An excellent writer, Sarah Churchwell (who has previously written onThe Great Gatsby and America, has a new book out: Behold, America is 'indispensable'.

Times Live from South Africa mentions Tim Winton's great The Shepherd's Hut (so evocative of the landscape of Western Australia) and Michael Ondaatje's Warlight, which many had expected to be getting major prizes.

One of the best online magazines, Slate, has 10 Best Books of 2018 from Laura Miller, including the latest novel from Alan Hollinghurst, The Sparsholt Affair, and Tana French's latest well-received The Witch Elm.

Flavorwire'sBest of 2018 by Sarah Selzer identifies a 'mini-trend', 'books about women’s anger (both at their personal lot and at sexism at large)'.

No better place than Nature for Best Science Books (and shows) of the yea, such as Dermot Turing's account of the background behind his uncle's code-breaking, X, Y & Z: the Real Story of How Enigma Was Broken.

CBC has best Canadian non-fiction, including Tima Kurdi's The Boy on the Beach, based on one of the most distressing photographs of recent times, as well as best Canadian fiction, including the internationally-successful Washington Black by Esi Edugyan, as well as plenty of individual recommendations.

The English and Media Centre has a great list of Christmas reading recommendations (from all years, and all the way back to Middlemarch). Perfidious Albion, the 'Brexit-novel' by Sam Byers, is one (hard to match reality, of course).

The Big Issue's selection by Jane Graham of best children's books includes The Dam by the 'giant' of children's writing, David Almond.

GQ Magazine has 17 Best Books of 2018, with Assymetry by Lisa Harding featuring, which it does in many lists: Harding herself recommends Deviation by Luce d'Eramo, 'a novelistic treatment of her life experiences with Fascists and Nazis.'

Monday, December 10, 2018

The latest edition of the pupil magazine, The Submarine, has just been published, and you can read it above via Issuu (click on the arrows to go through the pages, click again for a closer view, and click the icon bottom right for full-screen). Tania Stokes, Avi Johnston and Edna Johnston put it together.